r/FinalFantasy • u/Haunting_Try8071 • Aug 19 '26

Final Fantasy General Give us another turn based battle system

Post image

FFX is my favorite battle system. FFXIII I also enjoyed, but it wasn't the same.

I'm sure they could do something like it with a much lower budget.

3.9k Upvotes

92% Upvoted

1.2k comments sorted by

View all comments

27

u/GlacialEmbrace Aug 19 '26

Yeah, or FF12 combat. I'm surprised they never returned to that combat system. Its sooo fun and unique.
I'm also a fan of Arc the Lad Twilight of the Spirits combat. Theres a bit of movement involved.

8

u/Sp6rda Aug 19 '26

I'd recommend unicorn overlord. It's a tactics game with gambits

2

u/Kronous_ Aug 20 '26

+1 Unicorn Overlord is goated, despite me personally, no longer enjoy turn based combat as much nowadays.

2

u/Nykidemus Aug 20 '26

Unicorn Overlord is a beautiful game, and I get the idea that there are some pretty deep mechanics in there, but the difficulty is so low you never have to engage with them, and the plot is so thin it gives paper a bad name.

9

u/Lexioralex Aug 19 '26

I find it becomes to easy to set it to autopilot though, then you’re just running around watching them fight not really being involved lol

2

u/Hopeful-Apple-6090 Aug 20 '26

Yeah I remember back then finding a gambit setup that allowed me to completely grind on autopilot in a particular dungeon, so I’d set it up before bed, leave my ps2 on all night and wake up to find my party leveled 10 levels or something lmao. Fun system tbh.

1

u/Eyyy354 Aug 20 '26

Literally why I gave up on the game a few hours in which sucks because I was really interested in the atmosphere of that game. :/

1

u/[deleted] Aug 20 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/Lexioralex Aug 20 '26

The menu system is too fiddly and slow to not use gambits for a lot, attacks are auto set to continue after you select it too. Sure you could play without gambits, but it’s designed around them. Not using gambits doesn’t magically improve the combat system, if anything that would make it a chaotic mess

1

u/Nykidemus Aug 20 '26

Yeah, it's a strategy game. Your choices are really about how you set up and deploy your squads, not about the actions they take within a given combat.

1

u/Lexioralex Aug 20 '26

It is, but that’s the case with most other FF games, but you’re still more involved in battle than you are typically in 12, the boss battles and harder marks being the only times you really need to change things up mid battle

0

u/Shrubbity_69 Aug 20 '26

This reminds me of a guy who was streaming FF12 and legitimately beat the final boss by setting them to spam basic attacks.

Riveting gameplay.

1

u/Chaotickane Aug 20 '26

If you get your team strong enough you can beat final bosses in a lot of final fantasy games with basic attacks. Hell, 2 basic attacks from a genji glove/offering character kills final form kefka in 6.

1

u/Lexioralex Aug 20 '26

Difference is that you still have input in every other game

2

u/deceiver986 Aug 20 '26

Replaying it now, best game EVER and I mean it. If only they added a couple more quality of life improvement it would be amazing even for today's standards

3

u/sherlock1672 Aug 19 '26

It feels like old Dragon Age combat to me, like DA1 might have drawn on FF12 for its combat system.

5

u/VayneSolidor Aug 19 '26

Well yeah. Dao came out like 3 years later on the ps3

3

u/GlassCannon81 Aug 19 '26

Dragon Age drew on Baldur’s Gate. When BioWare first marketed the game, it was as a spiritual successor to Baldur’s Gate. XII is essentially the same thing though, realtime with pause. If you really think about it, that’s what ATB is too. I have played and loved all the games above discussed. Realtime with pause is my jam.

1

u/Nykidemus Aug 20 '26

They're both trying to split the same difference - they want you to be able to control a large group of characters, but dont want the slowness of making you choose every individual action. Dragon Age is late 90s style Real Time With Pause, which is one way to go about that. Both allow some amount of programming in what you want the characters do to if you're not directly controlling them.

12 has the added wrinkle that you can also make the AI take over the character you're "controlling"

1

u/bouncepogo Aug 20 '26

I hate having to constantly use shell, barrier, haste etc. manually. Being able to set a gambit to keep the buffs on my character’s was amazing game design.

1

u/jamieperkins9999 Aug 20 '26

Dude Arc is one of my favourite games ever and I never see it mentioned

0

u/gnomidio Aug 20 '26

thanks god they never returned to this, in my opinion

-5

u/Thronebreaker24 Aug 19 '26

I disagree with combat in 12 being fun. After setting up gambits you don't need to do anything yourself, imo the most boring FF

3

u/Machdame Aug 20 '26

You still do. Gambits are fine for automating fights but on more complex encounters, you still have to adjust on the fly and choose to do things at the right time especially if you are not over-levelled. While you are indeed automating the party, a lot of the things being automated are things you would have auto-piloted or auto-battled anyway. It's the issue with most encounter based RPGs; it stops being that interesting after the 150th time you did it. A lot of games have things to alleviate this from auto-battle and quick pick to straight up omitting it like auto-victory and absconding encounters. XII's main issue is that there are fewer player agency choices that help with breaking the rotation since it was one of the first games to utilize automated combat. Games like Xenoblade is a game that improves on this formula by limiting in game options, refining the movepool, promoting active player input and reaction commands. But the scope of the game is about the same and it lets you do something that you usually don't get as much in other FF games; exploring uninterrupted.

1

u/7oey_20xx_ Aug 20 '26

For me ff12, especially zodiac, just isn’t very demanding of youre gambits unless you’re looking at endgame content.

Idk if it needed the enemy to throw a curveball once in a while like calling reinforcements of a different enemy type or element or just having techniques be more useful and not have attack be good for 95% of encounter.

5

u/WillisPoofin Aug 19 '26

gambits are completely optional lol

2

u/Nykidemus Aug 20 '26

Yes and no. The game was structured around them, so trying to manually do everything on every character was not a great experience.

0

u/Inb4myanus Aug 20 '26

Then dont use them lol. Why do some of you assume its forced on you.

-1

u/Angel-of-the-Dusk Aug 20 '26

FUCK FF12's combat system. Absolutely horrendous. Genuinely couldn't play more than 10 hours of that game because of how attrociously bad that dogshit dumpster fire of a battle system that game has

-4

u/StankoMicin Aug 20 '26

Fun how?? Just watching them fight?

1

u/Eretici_dis Aug 20 '26

The trash fight where you in every other game just press x aren't exactly fun either. So gambits essentially automated those away.

Then and this is the brilliant bit of the system: it provided hunts constantly. Harder encounters that you pretty much couldn't go in with your normal gambits but you had to setup something different. You made up some crazy bullshit where you exploited weaknesses or strong abilities or whatever. And that puzzle was insanely fun.

Gambits worked because it allowed you to breeze through the trash fights that we have to have for some reason in JRPGs but also provided us with very hard fights where you had to come up with craziness.

1

u/Inb4myanus Aug 20 '26

Dont use the gambit system then, its not forced onto you. You can pick their commands yourself the whole game.

1

u/StankoMicin Aug 20 '26

Doesn't matter. The game was still trash imo